Current ext hard drive recs for Time Machine? ...

[mspace]

I've always done local manual backups to augment iDrive cloud account. The manual backups have become less frequent, unfortunately.

Spoke with music producer who told story about how downloaded music files from cloud had gotten corrupted in the transfer. He no longer uses cloud for that purpose.

Made me realize I probably should get on the stick with Time Machine.

What current brands/drives do you recommend?

Thanks!

[mattkime]

I'd just get whatever pops up as a good deal (and is large enough) on https://slickdeals.net/

[Tiangou]

Almost anything other than WD 2.5-inch.

(WD uses a USB board instead of SATA on some of their portable drives. It makes data-recovery exceptionally difficult and often quite expensive.)

[jdc]

what they said.

We all have "stories" about xxxxxx happening doing xxxxxx -- but one case isnt really a norm.

IMHO, best practice is to have 3 backups. 2 automated -- 1 hourly to a TM drive, 1 hourly to a Backblaze or cloud (*must* be automated) and a 3rd to a portable drive, at whatever increment you feel good about (mine is Wed & Friday 2x a week) and that drive goes in a small firesafe.

Use whatever software you like. In my case, since I only backup working files, I do it manually. I know the files that have changed and easily enough to copy over a 10-50 GBs I have.